Bright Eyes
by Rikkudo
Summary: Izuna rambles in the afterlife.
1. Chapter 1

I want my eyes back.

It's not too much to ask. It really isn't. But here's a fun little fact: the dead are not restored once they enter the afterlife. When you die, you arrive in the next world in exactly the same condition that you were in when you died.

Yeah, I wasn't too thrilled about that either. Maybe that's why some of the more primitive island tribes prize death in battle at a young age. Eternal youth doesn't sound so bad, even if you're already dead.

But seriously, I want my eyes back. I gave them to my brother as a dying gift: the ultimate blade he would use to defend our clan. I'm starting to wonder if that was such a good idea now. Just a few years ago, basically ALL of our clan showed up in the afterlife. Whatever my brother did, it definitely didn't protect our clan.

Oh, that's cute. You think I forgot about my eyes? Not a chance. I WANT THEM BACK. Do you know how _annoying _it is to walk around the afterlife completely blind? How humiliating it is that _Tobirama _of all people can catch me completely off guard whenever he wants to?

Also, I'm told that the empty eye-sockets look is a bit out-dated. Apparently zombies are all the rage now. Something about "pure resurrection" or something along those lines. Whatever. Those guys sound weak anyway.

I wonder what even happened to my eyes, anyway. I also wonder how my brother managed to avoid the Shinigami for all these years. I wonder if I _can_ get my eyes back.

Dear god, I hope so. I miss being able to see.


	2. Chapter 2

So my brother used my eyes to take over the world.

A part of me is more than a little terrified that anyone could be that _focused_ on something so obviously evil. Then again, I did tell him never to trust the Senju which started this whole thing. So you know. Live with your mistakes and all that. I wonder how that saying would be adapted to a dead person...

Moving on.

Now that Madara's dead, he told me that my eyes had quite the adventure. After I'd matured my Sharingan and gotten the Mangekyō after that, I was dying and Madara's sight was failing, so I offered him my eyes so he could avenge me. He didn't really succeed, but the thought's what counts. But when received my eyes, the Mangekyō changed and became something greater, and failing sight turned eternal.

That kind of power would have been nice to wield, especially against that bastard Tobirama. Madara told me how he'd speared the Senju with these Rikudo chakra rods after he and the four Hokage had been revived, so that made me feel a tiny bit better. Petty revenge may be petty, but it beats having nothing.

Back to the point. As it turns out, my brother eventually saw the hopelessness of creating a village. He understood that Hashirama was sincere, but he realized that the rest of the village would eventually consume the Uchiha clan. He tried to warn them, to _save_ them, but no one would listen to him. The cowards had no spine to recognize reality as it was, and they denounced him as clan head.

With nothing left to fight for, Madara left. I can't say I blame him. Had I been alive, I would have gone with him without a moment's hesitation, away from that wretched village and our traitorous clan.

Of course, Hashirama couldn't just _let_ him leave. But Madara was prepared. Just before Hashirama came for him, he'd ensnared the greatest of the Tailed Beasts, the Kyūbi. To use a force of nature as a weapon... If the Uchiha clan had that kind of power during the wars, we would have been invincible.

In the end, Hashirama was too strong for him, and Madara fell. But he didn't die. He dragged himself to safety and used some of Hashirama's cells that he'd harvested during their fight to heal himself, to survive.

Madara lived. He lived far, far longer than he should have lived.

And under the pressure of that unnatural merging of flesh and chakra, my eyes warped into something straight out of legend.

The Rinnegan, the eyes of the greatest of our ancestors, the Sage of Six Paths.

Using those eyes, Madara summoned the corpse of a demon from the moon, and hatched a plot to destroy the flawed shinobi system that he and Hashirama had brought into play.

But even with that unnatural lifespan, Madara didn't have forever. So my eyes switched hands yet again, secretly implanted into a young civilian-born boy of Uzumaki descent. An Uchiha would have been better simply because our bodies are naturally adapted to such eyes, but there were none outside of Konoha. And the Senju (to my glee) were slowly going extinct. However, there were still a few Uzumaki scattered throughout the elemental nations. The ones inside of Whirlpool were out of the question, but those outside of that village were ripe for the picking.

That boy grew up to wield his eyes like an angry, vengeful god. He _crushed_ Konoha, plowing into them and cutting down their shinobi and civilians alike with no regard for who he was killing or whether they deserved it. Sometimes it's scary to see (hear) what power does to people, how it corrupts them. But I didn't care. I was happy that Konoha was destroyed.

Unfortunately some _other_ Uzumaki brat (the Kyūbi's container, apparently, just like Mito had been) fought our Uzumaki to a standstill and managed to talk him into reviving everyone. All that work for nothing.

Then our worthless Uzumaki died. Fortunately, Madara had a backup plan. Before he died, he'd kidnapped a young Uchiha child from the middle of one of Konoha's wars. The boy was pathetic, weak enough to have been abandoned by the clan, but where everyone in Konoha saw a failure Madara could see the untapped potential. Putting the seal over his heart was easy, manipulating him into making him watch his only love being murdered even easier.

After a single night of murder and heartbreak, Madara had a follower who wanted the world to burn even more than he did.

After the Uzumaki failed to follow through in destroying Konoha, the follower did not take too kindly. Just as Madara would not have.

In one fell swoop, Obito stormed Ame, slaughtered its angel guardian, and took the Rinnegan from the Uzumaki's cold corpse.

He was the fourth person to wield my eyes.

He used them to star a war that spanned the world as we knew it. A war to end all wars, a war to destroy the shinobi system.

It had to do with the demon corpse that Madara had summoned from the Moon. The Gedō Mazō statue. Apparently it was the body of the Ten-Tailed beast, the monster from which all the Tailed-Beasts originated.

Madara had come up with the plan himself. He'd get Obito to collect the beasts and seal them within the statue, then revive him using the Rinnegan. After the Ten-Tails was revived, my resurrected brother would become its jinchūriki, reclaim my Rinnegan eyes from Obito, and use them on the Moon to make the perfect world.

It didn't quite go that way, though. Instead of being revived with the Rinnegan, Madara was summoned with Edo Tensei. Being dead, he _couldn't_ be the jinchūriki of the Ten-Tails. But in the middle of the war as Obito's strength started to fail, Madara forced him to use the Rinnegan to make his body living once more.

It was the perfect plan. Madara was _unstoppable_.

With the Rinnegan and the Ten-Tails, nothing could stand in his way.

So he leapt high into the air, and in the center of his forehead a third eye forced itself open and stared at the Moon.

And then it was done, and the world fell into an eternal slumber.

But almost immediately after, a demon tore herself free from Madara's body.

I still don't have my eyes.


End file.
